Initace 
A store ready for Black Friday is one that has hosting tested for a sudden surge of traffic, a checkout tested before the promotion starts, a plan for products that will sell out mid-promotion, and customer service prepared for more enquiries. In 2026 Black Friday falls on Friday 27 November. Below is a list of things to check several weeks ahead.
Hosting for a traffic spike
Traffic during a big promotion can be many times higher than on an ordinary day, especially the moment a newsletter goes out or ads start. It is worth asking your hosting provider well in advance whether the plan your store runs on will handle such a spike, and whether it can be temporarily raised if needed. If you want to check performance with a load test (a simulation of many customers at once), do it on a copy of the store or after agreeing it with the hosting provider — a test on a live store without warning may be treated as an attack.
A tested checkout
Placing a test order from start to finish — including payment, choosing a parcel locker or courier and receiving the confirmation e-mail — should be done a few days before the promotion starts, not on the day it begins. It is the simplest way to catch broken connections with the payment provider or the courier. Check the discount codes too: whether they work, whether they combine with one another in unintended ways, and whether they expire at the right hour.
A plan for sold-out products
A popular product on promotion can sell out very quickly. The store should show unavailability at once (automatically, based on stock level), to avoid taking orders for something that is no longer there. If you sell on several channels, check how quickly stock levels synchronise — more in the article on stock synchronisation.
Customer service readiness
More orders also means more questions about shipping status and complaints. It is worth preparing ready answers to the most common questions in advance, checking the courier pickup times for that week and making sure someone actually answers e-mails on those days.
A fresh backup
Before any larger change to the store (a new promotion, a price change, a new theme) it is worth having a current backup of the database and files — in case something goes wrong at the worst possible moment. A backup nobody has ever tried to restore is only a hope: check at least once that the store can be rebuilt from it, for example on a test server.
A week before: freeze changes
A common cause of failure at the sales peak is not the traffic itself but changes made just before it. So about a week before the promotion it is worth introducing a change freeze: no plugin or module updates, no new add-ons and no theme changes, unless it is an urgent security fix. Do all updates earlier, with time to check them. In the same week, check three more dates that can switch off the store at the worst moment: the validity of the SSL certificate (the padlock in the browser), the domain payment deadline and the hosting payment deadline. Also set up a simple downtime alert, so you learn about a failure at once and not from customers.
In short: check the hosting, place a test order, prepare a plan for sold-out products, staff for customer service and a fresh backup — ideally two to three weeks before the promotion starts. In the last week, change nothing more in the store.
Prefer updates, backups and watching over the store to be in someone else’s hands? See what Aftercare covers.
